Sovereign haircuts / BGR

Bulgaria

3 concluded restructurings, between 1926 and 1994. The earliest default they settle began in 1915. The worst cost creditors 90.8% of the present value of their claim, in 1954. The longest gap between a default and its settlement was 22 years.

Restructurings

56.3%

Median present-value haircut

90.8%

Worst present-value haircut

1 of 3

Cut face value by zero

$13.05B

Debt treated (2020 $)

Every restructuring

Two measures of the same deals, never combined. The present-value haircut discounts what creditors got against what they were owed; the face-value reduction counts only principal written off.

Present-value haircutFace-value reduction

Default	Settled	Years to settle	Present-value haircut	Face-value reduction	Debt treated (2020 $)	Source
1915	1926	11	47.0%	0.0%	$164M	Meyer, Reinhart and Trebesch (2022)
1932	1954	22	90.8%	92.6%	$163M	Meyer, Reinhart and Trebesch (2022)
1990	1994	4	56.3%	31.1%	$12.72B	Cruces and Trebesch (2013)

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Debt treated is the amount restructured, deflated to constant 2020 US dollars in the source file. A negative haircut means the new instruments were worth more than the old claim. Methodology

Bond prices

2 of 3 Bulgaria restructuring episodes have Waterloo prices during the restructuring interval

The haircut file dates episodes by year. Waterloo matches them by country code and plots a padded window from one year before default through one year after settlement.

The public Waterloo bond panel in this repo runs from Jan 1, 1822 to Dec 1, 1980. This selector uses price only, never pbid or pask, and shows one line per bond from one year before default to one year after settlement. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD”; it does not document normalization to face value. Across all 329 haircut episodes, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after Dec 1, 1980. Those two counts overlap. 1 of 3 episode starts after the panel ends.

Episode

Selected episode: default 1932, settled 1954, case 12, spell BGR_1932-1954. Window: Jan 1, 1931 to Dec 31, 1955.

GBP bond prices

Independent GBP y-axis; values are not scaled against another currency.

Bond legend (GBP)

7% Secured SF Gold Settlement Sterling Loan of 1927 (dated 1926) (GBP)

USD bond prices

Independent USD y-axis; values are not scaled against another currency.

Bond legend (USD)

Secured SF Gold 7.5% Stabilization Loan of 1928 (USD)

Secured SF Gold 7% Settlement Dollar Loan of 1926 (USD)

563 monthly observations across 3 bonds. 515 of those observations fall inside the shaded restructuring interval. Earliest point in this window: Jan 1, 1931. Latest: Dec 1, 1955. One line equals one bond; no cross-bond average is computed.

Bond	Currency	ISIN	Obs.	First	Last
7% Secured SF Gold Settlement Sterling Loan of 1927 (dated 1926)	GBP	not recorded	299	Jan 1, 1931	Dec 1, 1955
Secured SF Gold 7.5% Stabilization Loan of 1928	USD	not recorded	132	Jan 1, 1931	Dec 1, 1941
Secured SF Gold 7% Settlement Dollar Loan of 1926	USD	not recorded	132	Jan 1, 1931	Dec 1, 1941

Each option includes its case id and default-spell id. The chart includes every priced bond for that country in the window, so it does not identify bonds belonging to the selected restructuring. The one-year padding is a display window, one year either side; an editorial choice rather than a source-defined threshold. It uses waterloo_bonds.price only; pbid and pask are not averaged into it. The author README defines price as “bond price in GBP and USD” and does not document face-value normalization. GBP and USD observations use separate labelled panels and y-axes. Of the 329 episodes in the haircut file, 111 have no Waterloo country-code match and 177 start after 1980-12-01; these counts overlap. Later episodes show an absence message rather than an implied zero.

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo (bond-price panel) | Harvard Dataverse, Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo Methodology

Default spells

Spell	From	To	Years	Restructurings
BGR_1915-1926	1915	1926	12	1
BGR_1932-1954	1932	1954	23	1
BGR_1990-1994	1990	1994	5	1

Source: Meyer, Reinhart & Trebesch (2022), Sovereign Bonds since Waterloo | Cruces & Trebesch (2013), Sovereign Defaults: The Price of Haircuts | Asonuma & Trebesch (2016) Duration counts both endpoints. The spells table also carries a cumulative-haircut column; it is not published here because it does not reconcile with the per-episode haircuts, see the methodology. Methodology

The Cruces-Trebesch record: a third measure and the discount rate

The Cruces-Trebesch file carries 1 restructuring here, and adds the market haircut (the new instruments against the face value of the old claim, undiscounted) and the exit yield used to do the discounting. The deal label is the file’s own and is finer than the country: it names the instrument class the deal covered. The two files were assembled separately, so a deal here need not line up one-to-one with a row above.

Deal	Date	Present value	Market	Face value	Exit yield	Structure	Data quality
Bulgaria	1994-06-01	56.3%	56.3%	31.1%	12.9%	Brady deal	3 / 5

Source: Cruces & Trebesch, haircut dataset (2014 update) Data quality is the file's own 1-to-5 index of how well the deal terms are documented. Methodology

Debt still in default

The Bank of Canada-Bank of England default database records no debt in default for Bulgaria in its latest year.

Source: Bank of Canada-Bank of England Sovereign Default Database (CRAG) Bank of Canada terms (attribution). Includes domestic arrears, so it is not comparable with the debt-treated column above. Methodology

Methodology, the measures, and what this data cannot tell you